“The Irish bishops can still win an election.”
A friend of mine said this to me as the results of the two Irish referendums on the Family Amendment and the Care Amendment to the Irish Constitution started to filter through – indicating a dual defeat for the Irish government.
My friend was speaking somewhat in jest; I don’t think anyone believes that the intervention of the bishops, calling for Catholics to reject both proposals put forward by the government, ultimately played a decisive role in what turned out to be an embarrassing setback for the political Establishment in the Republic of Ireland.
But regardless whatever sway the Irish bishops may or may not have had, what occurred feels like a seismic event, certainly for modern Ireland.
In the weeks leading up to the referendums, a Yes-Yes result
was predicted, with polls indicating that a substantial majority of the
population favoured the propositions being put to them.
On the day, though, both propositions were defeated – heavily.
In the referendum on the Care Amendment, a whopping 75 per cent of voters rejected the government-backed position, the largest No vote in any referendum held in Ireland, and an almost inexplicable shift from polling a week out from the vote.
The referenda marked progressive attempts to “modernise” what liberal protagonists feel is a Constitution that retains far too many remnants of Catholic Ireland.
The Family Amendment referendum was designed to extend the definition of the family from being “founded on marriage” to undefined “durable relationships”.
The Care Amendment referendum promised to remove “outdated and sexist” language about guarding women from being forced by economic necessity into the workforce, and to broaden (while weakening) the efforts that the State should make to support “care” carried out by all potential family members.
Unlike previous referenda, only a rarified few “had skin in the game”, so to speak, this time round, in making these changes – changes that were, at best, virtue signalling efforts to appease a very vocal and patronising minority in Ireland whose hubris was built on 2 to 1 victories against “Ye Olde Ireland” in 2015 and 2018 by altering the Constitution through popular vote to bring same-sex marriage and abortion into Ireland.
Whereas before there were concrete progressive issues, in which there were clear gains to be had, at stake in referendums, this time around, though, the referendums amounted to asking the electorate to accept loose words fuelled by an ideological fervour that failed to excite and ultimately unnerved the electorate.
During the 2018 abortion referendum, in the final week of campaigning, there was a very real sense of a shift in momentum I’m favour of the Yes vote.
This time, though, the momentum shift moved in the opposite direction as representatives from the government and organisations backing the changes were continually shown up – and to be lacking – during television and radio debates.
Unable to provide credible reasons for the changes or to counter the charge of the risk of “unknown unknowns” that the small number of opposition voices were raising as possible consequences of these changes, the government parties began to sound hectoring and condescending while appearing to assume a stance of infallibility on the consequences of re-ordering the Constitution.
On the last day of campaigning, one of the governing coalition parties, Fine Gael, released two short videos on X (formerly known as Twitter) that felt like the desperate death rattle for the Yes-Yes vote.
In the first video,
ironically/mockingly paraphrasing the Constitution, the declaration of
“Women! Do your duty!” was overlayed on a crackly video that insinuated
how a rejection of the Care Amendment proposal would send Ireland back
to the 1950s where women lived Pleasantville-style lives, chained to the kitchen sink.
In the second – a production of the type you would expect to see from Save the Children in
the midst of famine – the electorate was warned that if the Family
Amendment proposal was rejected then hundreds of thousands of children
would wake up the next day to the news that their family is not
recognised by the Constitution.
In both, the implication was that a No-No vote
would change the country beyond recognition, despite that vote actually
being a vote for maintaining the constitutional status quo.
In the end, the electorate grew tired of being talked down to – and misled. The government was repeatedly accused of misinformation in the run-up to the vote and were unable to shake the accusation.
In hindsight, the question remains of why the few would go to such great lengths for such minor gains, while in the process discrediting themselves.
For progressives, there was little to be won on the face of it (bar the further erosion of traditional bulwarks – perhaps that was enough to validate all the efforts); for conservatives, though, there was much more that was clearly at stake: it was about protection of the traditional family unit, of marriage, and about for the valuable role that women, mothers, play in domestic life and the raising of children.
And yet when it came to debating such significant changes, only a small cohort of independent voices, including Ireland’s Catholic bishops, as well as the smallest party in parliament, stood up against the monolithic Establishment – comprising both the government and opposition parties, along with state-funded lobby groups who have happily been absorbed into the machinations of power.
It appeared to be David versus Goliath.
But after four years of majority government, including the heavy-handed and unaccountable response to Covid-19 (with Ireland enduring ones of the strictest lockdown regimes in Europe), the failure to manage a housing and homeless crisis, the never-ending crisis in the health service, a dismissive response to concerns related to immigration, the proposed implementation of a draconian hate-speech law and the embracing of progressive sex education at all levels in education – after all that, those small dissenting voices had had enough of not being listened to, and that chimed with the electorate.
New small grassroots groups began to come to the fore, free of ties to government funding, while representative of people who no longer feel heard by their representatives.
The government, hoisted with its own petard, had completely lost touch with the electorate, growing to entirely believe and trust its own rhetoric, replayed in an ever more insular and insulated echo-chamber.
The Irish bishops, after years of being accused of being part of Established Ireland during the dark ages, are now firmly part of the counterculture that is arraigned against an elite that embraces individualism, secularism and progressivism, gender ideology and a culture of death in a claustrophobic conformism that stifles, marginalises and cancels.
Whether the bishops will continue to embrace that position in which they have inadvertently found themselves remains to be seen.
After 30 years of continual defeats for conservative voices in Ireland, it is tempting to think that something has changed.
That there is a shift starting/ongoing.
But as with the bishops’ new countercultural posture, it remains to be seen how it pans out.
Though 2024 will see a General Election in Ireland, with 70 per cent of the population having just voted against propositions supported by parties that hold 90 per cent of the seats in parliament.
Whether the electorate will carry that shift into those elections is certainly not guaranteed, but during the most recent referendums, independents and parties such as Aontu have shown that they are more attuned to the mood of the people than both those who have occupied the corridors of power and those who have pretended to call themselves an opposition.
If nothing else, what may have changed in Ireland is that there may now be more reticence when it comes to eviscerating the Constitution of Ireland and its Catholic and Christian heritage.
Given all the above, it is worth citing the preamble to the Irish Constitution:
In the Name of the Most Holy
Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all
actions both of men and States must be referred,
We, the people of Éire,
Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial
Though never stated, herein is the ultimate prize for progressives that needs to be protected against – the unmooring of Ireland’s founding document from its Christian origins.